“I don’t choose our allies.”
“Look, I think I can get the lights back. The electrical closet’s just down the corridor. But I’ll need an extra pair of hands.”
“Hold on.” Polian crawled on his hands and knees until he touched the metal leg of the chair into which the woman was taped. He pulled himself upright until he felt her head, limp and slumped forward. The first jolt hadn’t knocked out only the lights. She was going nowhere.
This was, indeed, a minor glitch. It would remain minor as long as the lights were restored before some nervous idiot shot some other nervous idiot in a friendly fire incident.
Polian said to the interrogator, “Meet you at the door. Then we’ll feel our way. Keep close to the wall or some fool will shoot us both.”
One minute later, he and the interrogator stepped out into the pitch-black corridor. Polian barked his shin against the door guard’s desk and swore. He felt across the empty desk and chair. The guard was gone.
Polian laid his hand on the interrogator’s chest in the blackness and stopped him. “Wait!” The woman was unattended in the interview room. Polian fished the room’s key from his pocket, felt for the door handle, and locked her inside.
Forty-eight
I pressed my back against the stone wall of the building that hid us and listened to ferrent and Yavi shouts and footfalls provoked by the sudden darkness.
Alia crept alongside me and touched my arm. “Now, that was more like it!”
I shook my head and whispered as I peeped around the corner. “I didn’t do anything.” I turned the bush knife blade in my hand as I sheathed it. “At least, I don’t think I did.”
Through the snoops I saw the ferrents, all prone, rifles aimed and facing out in a ragged, circular perimeter that surrounded their vehicles. The Yavi, without snoopers, had also frozen in place, guns drawn but with nowhere to shoot in the dark.
I whispered, “Maybe a power outage. Maybe the Yavi cut the lights to slow down the ferrents.” If so, why were people shouting and shooting inside the building?
Chaos and uncertainty ruled the moment.
Military history was littered with the regrets of soldiers who failed to seize the moment. It was also littered with the bodies of more of them who seized the wrong moment.
If the lights came up while we waited, hidden here, we could just go ahead and recon the place as I had planned. No problem. Except that we would then have to try to come back and start over.
Alternatively, I could run four hundred yards mostly behind cover, then the last hundred yards concealed in darkness that was like green daylight to me. If and when I got inside I had to navigate another hundred yards of corridors that I knew only from a non-military observer’s secondhand reminiscence. Then, in some eleven-year-old’s fantasy, I would somehow rescue the princess. Hell, in my fantasy, too. This was what I came for.
I bent, reached into my rucksack, and drew both machine pistols and chest holsters.
Alia held out her hand and wiggled her fingers.
I slipped the right holster over my shoulder as I stared at her hand. “What do you want?”
“My gun. I’m not going in unarmed.”
“You’re not going in at all.”
Her jaw dropped. “Why not?”
I hesitated. “Because I said so” was likely to get me as far with an eleven-year-old girl as it always had with a thirty-three-year-old woman.
I said, “Uh, because this is a raid. Did Pyt teach you about raids?”
She raised her chin. “Naturally.”
“Quick in, quick out. If the raiding party gets separated during the raid, they need a secure place to reassemble. A rally point. You’re the rally point security element.”
She rolled her eyes. “You made that up. You’re just scared I’ll get hurt.”
No to the first, yes to the second. I shook my head. “No.”
“Yes, you did! You can’t get separated from yourself.”
I exhaled. Why me? There wasn’t time to argue. “There’s only the one set of snoopers.”
“Oh. I guess you’re right.”
Not that I was crazy about leaving her here alone. I dug in my rucksack again, stood, and held out an object. “This is—”
She squinted in the dark. “A six-shot double-action .38 with a three-inch barrel and iron sights. Inaccurate, compact, reliable. Good backup gun.”
“Oh. Can you use it?”
“Pyt taught me more than raids.”
I handed her the pistol. She flicked open the cylinder, checked it, then tucked it into her trousers’ waistband while I hefted the rucksack onto my shoulders. My teeth were clenched, and I expected the power to flash back on every instant.
Alia stood in front of me, rearranging my holster straps and the knife scabbard. Finally, she patted her palms on my chest, then stood back and looked me up and down in the dim light. “There! Now you look ready to rescue a princess! You should’ve shaved, though.”
I didn’t feel ready. But I ran, crouching, into the dark, weighed down by my load and by anxiety that the lights would expose me in the open, that Alia wouldn’t stay put, that after all this Kit wouldn’t be there, or…
I circled behind another building and made the clinic’s side door in three minutes without incident. I set the ruck on the ground, tugged out a door bore, and grasped the doorknob to fit it in place. The door opened, and I swore at myself for time wasted by not trying the door first.
Then I was inside. The door led in to a level lower than the level on which Kit was, I hoped, being held. The stairwell up was empty, and I navigated the stairs easily with my snoops.
The public corridor at the top of the stairs bustled, if you can call nurses stumbling around searching for candles bustle. I padded down the corridor in total darkness, an unseen shadow breathing hoarsely. The T-junction where a Yavi guard was supposed to be posted was deserted. I peered left down the corridor that led to the front of the building and saw two Yavi peeking around the half-open entry doors with guns drawn. The ferrents had been kind enough to divert my opposition.
I crossed the corridor intersection behind the preoccupied guards’ backs, then counted doors as I walked.
I stopped in my tracks when I heard two male voices behind one door on my left, realized that the door was closed, and bypassed them.
Finally, I saw ahead the fourth door on the right. I didn’t really have to count. The physician had said that a desk and chair had been set up in the hallway as a station for the all-hours guard. The desk and chair were right where they were supposed to be. The all-hours guard wasn’t. I suspected he was one of the two now guarding the front door. I smiled as I ran. Chaos could be a spook’s best friend.
When I got to the door, I stood back and cased the job. The door to the right of the desk was supposed to lead to the room where Kit was being held. The door to the left of the desk, according to the physician, led to a smaller room from which patients in the room next door, head cases, could be observed.
Both doors were steel, with massive, keyed locks set below their knobs. Each was hinged to open out to the hall, so the door couldn’t be removed from its hinges from inside. Apparently Tressen head cases could get feisty.
I tried the knob on the door behind which I was supposed to find Kit. Unlike the outside door, this one didn’t budge. I eyed the exposed door hinges. Unhinging a door to open it was noisy. So was a door bore. And both had the undesirable side effect that thereafter the door couldn’t be closed if plans changed. And the one certainty in a planned operation was that plans changed.
As the mental clock ticked down in my head, I shrugged off my ruck, opened it on the vacant guard desk, and retrieved my lockpick set. Then I knelt in front of the door handle and reset the snoops for close work. I also cursed myself for dozing through Lockpicking and Safecracking 101.
That wasn’t the real name of the class. The spooks euphemistically named it Defense Against Methods of Entry. Trueborn case officers would never, ever
break in to somebody else’s locked property, of course. We just needed to know how bad people might try to do it to us. Same thing for Defense Against Sound Equipment. I also had loaded a regular bughouse of listening devices into my ruck.
I glanced left and right. This corridor remained deserted. The distant murmur of distracted nurses and doctors in the dark soothed my nerves.
Still, as I slid the first slim pick into the keyhole and wiggled it, my fingers trembled.
Then something clunked in the distance, and I jumped.
Overhead, the corridor lights flickered.
I whispered, “Crap.”
Forty-nine
“It was just a circuit breaker.” In suddenly restored light, the interrogator turned and smiled, blinking, at Polian. The two of them were wedged into a cramped room, barely an elongate closet, walled with vertical pipes and insulated conduits.
The man lifted his hand off of a copper knife switch bolted to the side of a gray steel box on the wall of the tiny room. Polian released the heavy top-hinged access panel that he had held open while the interrogator had worked. “Done?”
The interrogator wiped his hands on his trousers. “I think so.”
Polian backed until he touched the door that led from the utility closet to the corridor, then turned and looked down the bright-lit, white corridor toward the interview room. He blinked.
The interrogator backed out and stood by Polian. “What’s wrong?”
Polian shook his head as he peered down the corridor at the vacant guard’s desk. “Nothing. But the guard hasn’t returned.” Then he jerked a thumb back toward the T-junction of the corridors while he stared. “He must have gone to cover the main-entrance door when the power quit. Go back down there and fetch him, will you?”
The interrogator nodded, then walked away, his footsteps echoing on the floor tiles while Polian kept staring. Elsewhere, he heard the voices and footfalls of hospital staff as normalcy returned.
Then Polian walked slowly down the corridor toward the interview room where he had left the woman shocked senseless, bound, and gagged. Though the little recent excitement had passed without incident, he breathed faster now. It was as though an undercurrent was pulling him forward.
Fifty
Heart pounding, I pulled the heavy door shut behind me and heard it lock. Then I stepped into a suddenly bright, classroom-sized room, windowless on three white walls. A blacked-out window ten feet wide, with its lower sill waist high, was set in the fourth wall’s center. In the room’s far corner was a cot. Closer to me stood a table and two chairs. A man’s jacket hung half-off one chair back, like someone had left in a hurry.
I tugged off my now-unnecessary snoops to widen my field of vision and saw a console on the table. Cables ran from the console to the floor, then crossed the floor to a metal-frame chair.
My heart skipped. In the chair sat a person, back to me, wearing a loose gray smock and trousers. Blonde, female, head bent forward, she slumped, motionless.
I sucked in a breath as I stepped toward her.
Her arms were taped tight to the chair’s legs, her arms to the chair arms. Copper wires were taped to her palms and the soles of her bare feet, and were wrapped around the chair frame.
“Oh, God. Oh, God,” I whispered as I came around in front of her, knelt, and looked into her face. “Kit!”
Her eyes were closed, and her tongue protruded, bloody and swollen, from her mouth.
I shook my head. “No! Oh, no!”
She breathed, barely. I peered at her. It wasn’t her tongue, it was some sort of bloody rag.
At least I had paid attention in first aid, even during Legion Basic.
Step one. Clear the airway. I slipped trembling fingers into her mouth and freed the bloody rag. I felt around her tongue. Not swallowed. Airway clear.
She breathed deeper.
Step two. Stop the bleeding. I searched her torso and limbs but found no bleeding. Good. But if she was puking blood, she was bleeding internally. I couldn’t put a tourniquet on that. All I could do was watch her die. “Goddamit! In the middle of a fucking hospital!” I tore off my rucksack and flung it on the floor.
Her eyes opened. She looked up at me and blinked.
My eyes burned as my throat swelled.
Her eyes widened, blue, enormous, and bloodshot. “Parker?”
She shook her head and asked again through lips dark with dried blood, “Parker? If it’s you, am I dead?”
I took her face between my palms and held it until I got her to look into my eyes. “Kit. Look at me. Listen to me. Do you know where you’re bleeding?”
“What?”
“Ribs? Gut-shot? Chest cavity?” I drew back, looking down at her torso. No bloodstains.
She looked sideways, at the bloody rag in my hand. “That’s not my blood, Parker. You should see the other guy.”
I turned my face up and closed my eyes. “Thank you!” Then I leaned forward and kissed her cheek, stranger’s blood and all.
“Cut me loose, Parker.”
I retrieved the rucksack, tugged out my knife, and sawed at the tape that bound her legs with the knife’s serrated edge. “What the hell is all this?”
“Yavis.”
“That I know.”
“Electric-shock interrogation.”
“Bad?”
“Do I look like it was good?”
I cut the last tape off her arms and smiled at her. “Better now?”
She threw her suddenly freed arms around me and hugged me. I slid my arms around her, too, gently, and nearly recoiled. Beneath the smock she felt tiny, wasted. Then she began to shake and sob.
She whispered, “God, I missed you.”
I felt wetness on my ear, then the touch of her lips.
Alia had been right. The princess had kissed me.
I held her and cried, too.
After a few seconds, she drew back from me and wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand.
I stared at her hair, which was frizzed out like a scouring pad, then pointed. “Love what you’ve done with it.”
She narrowed her eyes in a stare I hadn’t seen for two years. “Bite me, Parker.” Then she pointed at my rucksack. “You bring the usual suspects?”
I nodded.
“Good. I got a couple things to attend to.”
Thirty seconds later we stood together in the center of the room.
Clack-clack.
Behind my back, the room’s doorknob rattled.
Fifty-one
As Polian stood at the interview-room door, his relief that it remained locked turned to annoyance. He grunted as he tried again to force the mechanical metal key into the mechanism.
The interrogator trotted up, the missing door guard in tow, and asked Polian, “Jammed?”
“Hasn’t been.” Polian turned to the door guard. “You had any trouble with this lock?”
“None, Major.” The man shook his head, then jerked it back up the corridor. “Sir, we got a problem. Just before the lights went out, two truckloads of ferrents pulled up to the front door. Two full rifle squads. They say they got a warrant to take the prisoner. The others have been holding ’em off ’til they could come and get you. Then the power went.”
Polian nodded. “Alright.” He had expected the ferrents sooner or later. Not in force, but in some fashion. He raised his palm. “I’ll go argue with them in a moment.”
“You might not want to, sir. The ferrents are real jumpy. When the lights went out, it almost started a firefight. Our guys are jumpy, too.” The broad-shouldered guard pointed at the door. “You want me to break it down, Major?”
Polian glanced up the corridor. Two nurses, arms full of linens, paused there, watching casually. They probably, and correctly, blamed the power outage on their visitors. Polian had no desire to advertise the Yavi presence further by breaking down doors.
He shook his head at the guard. “As long as the woman’s still unconscious in here, we can take the
time to work on the lock.” He pointed at the observation closet’s door. “I’ll check.”
Fifty-two
Kit and I stared at the wiggling door knob as we crouched alongside the metal chair that had held her. The conversation beyond the door stopped.
Kit whispered, “They can’t get the door open.”
I whispered back, “I think I broke the pick off in the keyhole.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Better lucky than competent.”
“Thanks.”
One set of footsteps sounded in the hall, and Kit gripped my arm.
“What’s wrong? They can’t see us in here,” I said.
She pointed at the dark window in the side wall. “One-way glass. I always hear them going around to the room next door to watch me. They’ll be able to see us in a minute.”
She reached across me and drew one of my machine pistols from its holster. A shoot-out with the half-dozen Yavi commandos who would soon burst through the door to this sealed room was a terrible option. Especially because the shots would probably spook twenty-plus ferrents, who would rush the place. I closed my hand over hers and the pistol. “No.”
She stared at me. “Parker, I’ll go down blazing before I’ll go back in that chair.”
“Me, too. But we may not have to.”
“We can’t just disappear.”
Fifty-three
Polian opened the door to the observation closet, flicked on the dim light, then stepped to the window, turned, and peered into the interview room.
He gasped. Then he stepped forward and pressed his palms and nose against the glass. “What the hell?” He pounded the thick glass with a fist, and his voice rose to a shout. “What the hell?”
In the room’s far corner stood the woman’s cot. Off center was the table upon which the interrogator’s control console and the hologen rested. Polian’s jacket still hung half-off the chair back where he had left it. Wires snaked from the console on the table to the bolted-down chair. Nothing had changed. Except the chair was…empty. The tape that had bound the woman dangled in slashed strips from the chair’s arms and legs.
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